This is the fourth and final in this series of seasonal essays which began with Winter on the Hill. Thank you for reading, and affording my words the space in your inbox. Especially thanks to my paying subscribers for supporting me to keep writing.
Autumn is stunning on the hill. I look out in the morning and all I see are sheep, mountains, and sky. Sometimes it’s thick and heavy with rain, or soft and still and the sounds of the sheep bleating, crows cawing and stags roaring echo eerily through the mist. Other times it’s wide open and blue above the clouds and everything glimmers in the sun, a layer of thick, white fluff shrouding the valleys below as though we’re suspended in some other place up here, a place between worlds. I can easily lose a morning watching the light on the landscape shift, every fleeting moment a painting of colour and shadow and form that begs to be photographed, a snapshot of a landscape that is ever-changing yet as old as time.
The mist and magic of September sunrises and sunsets gave way early to October storms that stripped our willows bare before their leaves had a chance to turn. Torrential rains have flooded our wetlands and burst the streams’ banks and the land is sodden, deep mud and squelchy underfoot, but still the season is unseasonably warm, steamy, and we work sleeveless and sweaty between the downpours. Late autumn picks up a pace after the late summer lull, every rainstorm brings with it the threat of staying until spring; every dry break, every blast of low, steamy sun could be the last. It could be a long winter, we warn each other, there’s an urgency now to finish the jobs we started in summer, to make sure drains are draining, roofs are secure and under hoofs are dry.
On the land, the moor grass turning gold now with the changing season, yellow gorse and pink heather still lighting up the rocks, streams full and gurgling, I wade through last night’s rain to carry hay out to the sheep even as the low autumn sun draws sweat from my back and the land steams. Birch stands dark and silent in the mist, a few tattered, yellow leaves still fluttering. Big bunches of holly berries gleam scarlet against their dark foliage, and ivy hangs heavy and dripping from broken boughs with the strain of its own rain drenched weight.
Down in the valley below us, hawthorn hedgerows are crimson and full with berries, and crab apples droop with the weight of their fruit. They say when the wild fruits give such a glut, that we are in for a hard winter. The wild flora gives so the fauna may grow fat and spread their seed, survival in symbiosis.
When I drive down into the valley for supplies, sika hinds and their calves foraging in the road verges startle, stop still and stare back at me with big, soft eyes, and bound off into the dark understory of the forestry borders before I can reach for my camera. I have recently learned of the EU-wide plan to officially classify Japanese sika deer as an invasive species, which would mean an end to seasonal hunting restrictions and year round, ruthless culling with an aim to eradication. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The issue of “invasives” is too complex to tackle here. I understand—and support—the need to control them, but also that they fill a niche in the landscape in the absence of native wild ungulates (will native red deer repopulate these hills if we take out the sika, perhaps?), and reciprocate as providers of wild meat through the hunting season. Perhaps my sympathy for them is personal, as a transplant myself—the deer are as much a part of this landscape as I am.
The stags have reached their roaring crescendo now, these shortening, grey days of October punctuated from dawn through dusk with the calls of the wild beasts. The sika stags’ “roar” sounds more like a blood-curdling scream, something between the yowling of a cat fight or a fox in heat and the wail of a banshee, eerie and haunting, befitting the season. Funny story: the first time my Husband heard a stag scream, he thought it was me falling off a cliff or being murdered, and he immediately set off down the land with a canine search party to find me. I was in the goat shed. I thought he was out and hadn’t seen his car arrive back, so when I heard a distant yelling, “CAARRRRLYYYYYY” from across the hill, I freaked. What or who the fuck was that?! Were they calling me?! Where was it coming from?! Had he crashed his car down the hill?! And where are the dogs?! Our eventual reunion was not one of our finest marital moments.
Foxes are around. The scent of them drives our dogs to distraction, and in the mornings there are fresh paw prints in the mud along the hill trails. Our lambs are all grown enough not to be worried by a fox now, but we lock the ducks safely in their little timber house at night. An old guy drives by here sometimes who tells us he sold this land, long ago. And he relays stories in a thick, toothless, barely comprehensible, old tongue of how, as a young man, he would climb to the top of our hill, “madra rua,” he calls it, the hill of the red fox, to watch the foxes play in the fields below. So far, despite our hill being the hill of the red fox, our sheep being tiny and vulnerable on the rough terrain, and our ducks free-ranging wherever they please, often down to the wetlands or over the road several hundred yards out of sight and earshot from the safety of their home pond, our resident foxes seem content with voles, frogs, blackberries and bumblebee larvae (I found a dug out bumblebee nest one morning with many bumblebees frantically trying to carry their grubs to safety), but they haven’t given us any trouble, so far. And so we live and let live.
With Samhain, the start of the Celtic Wheel of the Year and the beginning of Winter, we begin a new shepherding year. The ewe lambs have weaned themselves and harvest is done, our freezers and hay barns are full, the last of the fat lambs are hanging in the butcher’s cold room, the cycle complete. The ewes are rested, (reduced) breeding plans have been made and and my rams smell of the greasy musk of rut. They test their strength against each other to rouse themselves for action, not that they’ll get much this year, and the bone-cracking thwack of horns clashing accompanies the roaring of the stags through the evening mist.
My rams are good boys, I won’t tolerate anything less. They stop their rucking to step back politely while I spread their hay, a munch of something sweet to momentarily quell their hormones, but I feel their impatience. Their fuses are short. I move quietly and quickly and give them space, puff powder on their bloodied heads and check their condition from arms length, and leave them to their rut. Not long now boys, not too long now.
I love the sounds of the hill. Question: how did the sika deer come to be in Ireland in the first place?